Srinagar, June 29 -- India's social fabric has always been shaped by diversity, coexistence, and collective participation. Yet in times marked by communal anxieties and emotional fragmentation, one crucial voice often remains unheard in conversations surrounding peace and policy making i.e. the voice of women. Across communities, women continue to act as silent negotiators of harmony within families and neighbourhoods, but their role in formal decision-making spaces remains deeply limited.

Within Muslim societies, this exclusion is frequently justified in the name of tradition, even though Islamic history itself tells a remarkably different story. Islam did not imagine women as passive observers of society; it acknowledged them as contri...